Case Study

A REIT Boosts Efficiency and Cuts Costs with Trigent's AI-Powered Property Management Solution

Real Estate
Generative AI

About the Client​

The client is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and North America’s most prominent publicly-traded owner and operator of open-air, grocery-anchored shopping centers. Primarily concentrated in first-ring suburbs of major metropolitan markets, the client is gradually growing its portfolio of mixed-use assets. Founded in the late 1950s, it rapidly expanded to Sun Belt cities, focusing on essential and necessity-based goods and services. Included in the S&P 500 Index, the organization has specialized in shopping center ownership, management acquisition, and redevelopment activities for over six decades.

Business Challenge

The client manages a vast portfolio of over 550 shopping centers and mixed-use assets covering a leasable area of over 100 million square feet. To maximize Annual Base Rent (ABR), property managers need to ensure the right portfolio of retail stores in the shopping center, maintain 95%+ occupancy levels, and drive periodic increases in rental yields. The challenge, though, is to track the status of every commercial rental unit across their portfolio of property assets.

Every lease, even for the same chain across different locations, is governed by distinct contracts with unique terms, lease conditions, rent rates, and compliance with county, state, and federal regulations. Details of floor plans and common-use resources contain unstructured data that are hard to manage. Property managers and coordinators are also responsible for administrative tasks such as collecting vendor bids, processing invoices, and coordinating maintenance.

Given their property portfolio, the client required an out-of-the-box solution to augment their current Property and Document Management systems.

Trigent’s Solution

Trigent conducted a comprehensive discovery process that included client interviews, application walkthroughs, and tech stack evaluation. The client’s current Property Management Software and Document Management Systems used to catalog and manage documents have very limited ability to extract data present in them. For example, to identify the list of tenants contractually obliged to use the center resources, they need to retrieve and review the contracts and compile the list manually – a laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone process.

Trigent proposed a first-of-its-kind solution that provides property managers with a simple interactive chat interface. With simple conversational text queries, they can locate, identify, and retrieve property records that match the query criteria. Developed by Trigent AXLR8 Labs Product Studio, the UI/UX maintains a conversational context that allows users to refine their queries and identify specific units, tenants, or contracts.

Powering this interactive chat interface is a GenAI system with pre-trained LLM and NLP for the property and real estate industry. The ninja teams of Trigent AXLR8 Labs for GenAI effectively integrated Azure services and a custom AI model, leveraging the power of GPT-3.5 to efficiently retrieve information related to client properties/sites for the internal executive team.

Meticulously trained on a diverse dataset extracted from PDFs, excel spreadsheets, and flat files containing intricate property details, the AI model excelled at extracting relevant unstructured data. Trigent AXLR8 Labs’ DataOps Services tagged, annotated, and created data sets that included the number of units, tenant records, Gross Leasable Area (GLA), rental income per unit, contract terms, regulatory responsibilities, and vacant units.

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This AI-driven approach empowered the executive team to swiftly access vital information about client properties/sites, facilitating informed decision-making processes. The model facilitated strategic planning by enabling seamless queries for essential metrics and providing insights into potential opportunities and risks associated with the properties/sites.

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Client Benefits

With Trigent’s innovative property management solution, our client enhanced operational efficiency and leveraged actionable insights for strategic planning. The REIT had a seamlessly managed real estate portfolio, driving tenant satisfaction and empowering executives with the tools needed for revenue maximization and cost minimization.

Here’s a quick look at the outcomes

  • Slashed Document Search Time by 40 Hours Daily: Trigent’s GenAI solutions’ streamlined search and retrieval enable property managers and analysts to save nearly two hours each, freeing up their 20-person team for 40 hours of strategic work daily.
  • Enabled Strategic Staff Deployment: Automating tasks reduced document management turnaround time by 10-20%. The client is now able to deploy resources for more critical time-bound work, enhance cost savings, and boost the bottom line.
  • Informed Decision-making: Trigent’s AI-driven approach facilitated strategic planning by enabling seamless queries for essential metrics, providing insights into potential opportunities and risks associated with the properties/sites.
  • Faster Report Generation: With the GenAI solution, property managers can compile lists of tenants who availed of different services or had exception clauses in their agreements within a day or two, instead of weeks. By using NLP for instant queries, managers can swiftly retrieve lists of locations or tenants that match specific criteria, gaining immediate access to critical information for smarter property management decisions.

Technology Stack